I was just reading the Wikipedia entry on the Epic of Gilgamesh. One of the sources cited states that “According to a long-standing Assyriological convention, the legendary ruler of Uruk had two names: Bilgames in Sumerian and Gilgames in Akkadian.”
How can we know that?
Sumerian is a language isolate, and it hasn’t been spoken for thousands of years. It wasn’t until the 19th century that people began deciphering Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions on excavated tablets. How can we know the phonology of such languages?
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We can’t that’s why they are considered extinct languages because they have no native speakers left and we can only theorize how they sound based on current languages that use them as a base or evolved from them.
You basically take a language that has its roots in the dead language and attempt to work backwards on how it may have been pronounced using the still spoken language as your base.
I don’t think I understand the connection from the names to phonology. Are you asking about how the name was translated from cuneiform to Latin characters, and how that resulted in a different name than the same person’s other name that had been translated into Latin characters from a different source?
To an extent, there is always going to be some guesswork. We can’t “know” in the way we know about things we can observe in the present. But we can get clues.
For example, even after Akkadian displaced it as the primary spoken language, Sumerian still functioned as a sacred and academic language, much like Latin today. By going through tablets of Akkadian, we can find references to Sumerian words that sound like Akkadian ones. And since there are a plethora of living Semitic languages, we have a connection we can work with.
If you read enough ancient literature, you’ll find lots of clues. Cognates, rhymes, puns, etc. It’s a lot like the Rosetta Stone but with phonology instead of vocabulary and grammar. If something we can read and sound out refers to something we don’t know, we can start putting the pieces together.
There are, of course, constructed pronunciation systems as well. Most Westerners I know sound Greek according the the Erasmian system, which was invented by Western scholars to study Greek, and doesn’t sound at all like how Greek is spoken today or was spoken in antiquity.
EDIT: I should add that linguists also have a few tricks. By studying how living languages shift in pronunciation, they can find patterns. Some human vocal sounds will shift in common ways. We can cautiously infer they may have shifted a similar way back then too.
Im not a linguist or philologist btw. I’ve had to brush up on ancient languages that are related to my own field. I’m sure there’s more than what I’ve listed.
Check out the YouTube channel Nativ Lang. It doesn’t have phonology for all languages but it does have some cool examples like how Ancient Latin sounded, or Shakespearean English sounded. They work it out by finding things like contemporary criticism.
You know how old folks might malign younger generations for how they talk? Well, people have been doing that forever. With the Latin example, I can’t remember the specifics but we effectively have records of people bemoaning “kids say X as though it rhymed with Y, when proper use dictates it should rhyme with Z!”
In general, we don’t really know for sure. However, we can observe that some word evolved to become that other word in another language, and that can be a good clue. You see the spelling change a bit at a certain time period, and that gives you information. Words evolve all the time, but those changes are not fully random. There are some common patterns in the way the pronunciation changes. So in some cases, you can put the pieces together, and make a decent guess about how it was pronounced.
Some languages also have a pretty consistent way to match the pronunciation of stuff to the spelling. So those are easy enough. You see how it’s written, that tells you how it sounds (in modern languages, something like Spanish does that pretty well, for example). Not all languages are as cryptic as English in that regard.
There’s a lot of guesswork still involved, but for ancient languages like Sumerian (that were written down), we can roughly reconstruct pronunciation. We can even reconstruct languages that were never spoken. It probably will never be exactly how things were pronounced, but it is ballpark.
Firstly, since something like Sumerian was written down in Cuneiform (which can represent syllables), we already get a rough ballpark of its expected pronunciation. Basically, since Cuneiform was a widely used script across the middle east, once it was deciphered (Akkadian specifically), scholars could get a rough idea of how other languages sounded, assuming they used a similar sound-symbol correlation. Of course, this means that the phonology of Sumerian isn’t that well understood since there are of course general differences in how the languages were pronounced, and anything sounds that other languages didn’t need from Cuneiform weren’t necessarily used.
The Etruscan language is similar. The Romans actually took the Etruscan’s alphabet to write down Latin. However, since then the Etruscan language itself has been lost, but we can ‘read’ their inscriptions phonetically even if we don’t necessarily understand what the words meant.
It took time to decipher, and in many areas we’re still working on it. But that’s an aside — to your question, scribes in Assyria wrote out translation tablets that we can read today. Like this: [Cuneiform Tablet a Tri lingual dictionary | National Museum Of Damascus (virtual-museum-syria.org)](https://virtual-museum-syria.org/damascus/cuneiform-tablet-a-tri-lingual-dictionary/)
Scribes wrote out language-learning dictionaries. Somewhat how we have Spanish-English dictionaries today, they did similar things back then. Many languages (though not all) used cuneiform script and anyone going into a profession of scribe, politics, etc. would have to be familiar with multiple languages same as we do now. And once we can read one language on such a tablet (if/when we find one) we can use the ancient language-teaching text ourselves, absent the live teacher.
Unfortunately they didn’t write for every possible language or script, but Sumerian was on their list of important languages and so we have quite a bit of material to help us decipher the language even though it is both extinct and an isolate.
It depends. For some extinct languages, e.g. Classical Latin, we actually have surviving sources that describe the way the language was spoken. For languages like Proto-Indo-European, there are no surviving texts. What we can observe though is the tendency for fairly regular patterns of sound change to occur in spoken language, and how those patterns of sound change differ between languages. Sound changes rarely affect single words in isolation – they are systemic (for example, a good number of Latin words with an ‘f’ sound have lost that sound on Spanish).
The reconstruction of PIE has largely been a process of looking for cognates among existing languages and working backwards to the roots by observing historical patterns of phonetic change in those languages.
I can give an example on how researchers found out how Ancient Egyptian sounded. That was due to Egyptian Coptic Christians keeping their language alive in their liturgical texts. In daily life they might speak French or Arabic but in their religious lives they spoke Coptic. It’s the only place this language could be found.
What’s special about the Coptic language is that it’s the last of the languages that descended from Ancient Egyptian. Due to that they could piece sounds together and while it might not be 100% correct it is as close an approximation as we’re likely to get.
The [Mediaeval Baebes](https://www.mediaevalbaebes.com/the-story1) sing “in an array of obscure and ancient languages”. When they first started, there were some experts who hated the music and words because no one actually knows what the pronunciation was. Others said, what a great way to introduce the languages to the world. They are still singing, decades later. You can probably dig up articles from the late 1990s about the controversy.
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